Spanish: Level 1

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I have four of the bigger, pricier Spanish courses out there (along with the Michel Thomas, complete Berlitz, and Instant Immersion Spanish courses) and I think it is the best of the four, with the possible exception of the last one, although the others are very good too. Each course has its strengths and weaknesses, so I thought I'd discuss each one a little by way of comparison.

I have the audio tape version of this course. It comes with a 600+ page book that allows you to follow along with the audio tapes, so you can learn to read the language as you improve your speaking ability. Interspersed between the audio portions are brief sections discussing important aspects of the grammar. At that point you can pause the tape, read the few paragraphs on the grammar material, and then resume the audio portion. This makes it very convenient to use. The approach is mostly geared toward getting you conversational rather than imparting all the details of the grammar--which is what most people want, anyway. But some of the grammar they include is fairly technical. I have several other Spanish grammars and this course is the only one that discusses the special co-preterite tense of the verb, which English lacks.

The way you can follow along with the text is very helpful. The speaker says a sentence in Spanish, and then they go back and repeat a portion of the sentence, adding more words until you have the complete sentence. This has the effect of allowing you to build up the sentence more easily from its component parts, since in the beginning you'll miss some of the words at normal speed. The workbook even includes a phonetic transliteration of each sentence, but they use a system I don't recognize (it's not the international phonetic alphabet version), so I don't really use that, but it's there if you want it.

An especially helpful feature is the so-called substitution drills, where a sentence is given, and then one word is substituted, such as a different subject pronoun, so that you hear the change in the verb conjugation, or a change in the tense or mood of the verb, depending on the situation. This is very useful for getting you used to the basic patterns, as well as the more complex verb conjugations and irregular verbs.

The main difference between the Thomas course and the other three is it is completely conversational. It's designed to be as painless as possible, and it works by starting the listener out with very simple sentences, and gradually building up to the more complex ones in easy steps, so that you learn the basic patterns of the grammar more intuitively. There is no manual, workbook, memorization, or other exercises to do. Thomas is renowned for being able to get people to at least a conversational level quickly and painlessly who said no other course had worked for them before (including some famous people such as Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand).

The Berlitz course is similar to the Foreign Service Institute's in that it has a workbook that supplements the audio. The Berlitz approach is heavily situational, basing the lessons on different travel situations, such as ordering in a restaurant, asking directions, buying tickets and getting through the airport, going to the bank, and so on. I haven't tried to work with the Berlitz one intensively yet, but my father many years ago was put through the French and Spanish courses for his job, and was able to do quite well with both languages--better than I could from two or three years of studying them in jr. high and high school--when we went on a trip to Europe many years later.

The Instant Immersion Spanish course is in many ways the most fun, diverse, and interesting. It uses a combination of the visual and audio modes for teaching. In that way it's similar to the Berlitz and Service Institute courses in that you can hear the audio and follow along and read the text on your computer screen. However, this course taps into the full power of a computer-based method in a way the others can't.

There are dozens of different types of exercises, and they've gone to some trouble to make them more interesting than your usual language course. For example, one of the exercises shows a video along with the native speaker's narration. Then you're given a series of multiple choice questions where you try to answer the questions based on what happened in the video. Another very cool feature is the context-sensitive dictionary. In the vocabulary and grammar exercises, if you don't recall a word, you can just click on the word and the meaning pops up on the screen, which is extremely convenient.

Another exceptional feature is the pronounciation exercises. You can record your own speech with a microphone, and then your sound pattern and the native speaker's is compared side by side using actual waveform analysis. It takes a little while to figure out how to correlate your speech with the recorded sound pattern to make improvements, but after a while you'll get the idea. You can also play yours back to compare yourself with the native speaker. The real-time speech analysis is a very powerful feature, and fun to work with. As you can see, a lot of thought and effort has gone into realizing many of the multimedia features possible in a computer-based program.

Hope my little comparison review of Spanish courses helps. Having course buying and learning!